Chapter 9: Setting Out in Pursuit

As the investigative team led by Tea Immortal began looking into the serial murders of Venice's nobles, currents were already stirring beneath the seemingly placid surface of continental Europe.

Steel Commandment had suddenly become much more active of late. Holy City Inspector Camo Bottrini's recent defeat had somewhat shaken his standing within the organization. Even after deploying the Holy Cross, a standard-bearer, and ten battle-hardened knights, he had failed to kill Blood Owl and had only added to their own casualties. The organization had subsequently been forced to relinquish control of Reflection City and destroy it. After making such a mess of things, he was bound to be branded “incompetent.” Fortunately, he had at least brought back one piece of potentially valuable information from the clash. This “Blood Owl” was very likely the “Godslayer” recorded in the Code of Commandments.

Could a book of prophecy written by a chief priest over a hundred years ago be trusted? Nobody could say for certain, but it was common knowledge within Steel Commandment that successive chief priests had possessed some ability to foresee the future. For instance, before Bottrini set out this time, the chief priest had said, “When the killer appears before you, you will know it is him.” And sure enough, it had come true.

There was a contradiction here, one that most religions had yet to resolve. Take people who believed in God. If you were convinced yours was the true faith, if you believed the world you lived in had been built by some bloke in seven days, then you also had to believe the Apocalypse would eventually come. You couldn't acknowledge only the good things and ignore the bad.

Steel Commandment had the same problem. If you had come together at the call of your faith, if you believed everything you did beneath that banner was right, then you also had to believe the prophecies that worked against you. You couldn't expect every favorable prophecy to come true while all the unfavorable ones turned out to be lies.

So when it came to “Blood Owl,” Steel Commandment's approach was neither to reject the Code of Commandments nor to acknowledge the threat he posed. This was probably the cleverest solution they could come up with. Were we supposed to be scared out of our wits just because this guy looked a little like a portrait His Reverence the chief priest had casually doodled a hundred years ago, and had killed a few hundred of our rank and file? How could we hold our heads up in front of the other resistance organizations then? If word got out, wouldn't the Empire immediately mass-produce a few hundred surgically altered Blood Owls to muddy the waters?

Clearly, Steel Commandment's leaders possessed far more intelligence and cunning than the village priests who had burned innocent peasant women as witches in the Middle Ages. To put it even more simply, what they called faith amounted to saying one thing and doing another.

They could put on a show of indifference, but in practice the grand master was already deploying troops and laying his plans. With Europe at its core, the organization was gathering every ounce of strength it could, poised to act. As the saying went, troops were trained for a thousand days to be used for a single moment. Perhaps the appearance of the “Godslayer” was precisely the signal urging them to make their move… Years of preparation had given Steel Commandment enough strength to challenge the Empire on an open battlefield. The time was nearly ripe. They needed only to wait for upheaval in the world, and their great undertaking could succeed.

…

February 27. A week into the investigation, they had solved quite a few cold cases from around the world and shut down some pig farms… Beyond that, they had found nothing.

Blood Owl's whereabouts remained unknown. He had broken his usual pattern and hadn't headed off to some randomly chosen major city to continue his experiments, leaving them virtually no trail to follow.

Nor could they get any more useful information out of Silver Shadow's three killers. Blood Owl had left those three alive in the first place to prove his “innocence.” That sounded preposterous at first, but it was actually easy enough to understand. By Blood Owl's logic, he could admit to killing ten thousand people, but he would never allow someone else to impersonate him and kill even one. In any case, those three were of little help in tracking him down.

A few days later, the investigation shifted its focus to Colonel Malone, another result of pressure from above. Catching a danger level four criminal was important, certainly, but the nobles' feelings had to be taken into account. The truth of the affair had to be established as quickly as possible so that Venice's rich and powerful could be given an explanation.

Tea Immortal found this deeply distasteful. Those mediocrities were always so shortsighted. It had been the same throughout his years of pursuing Tian Yi. Only his status as the seventh prince and his authority as an HL special agent had allowed him any freedom of action. Yet whenever a case involved the nobility or royalty, European headquarters would immediately send in large numbers of its finest personnel to work themselves into the ground, without his even asking, then set him targets and issue orders that had to be obeyed…

He had once complained quite openly in front of Paper Hero, “A pack of useless officeholders living off the public purse. Why should their deaths be mourned? Do they have any idea how many innocent lives will be lost if someone like Blood Owl is allowed to run rampant through the world?”

Who would have thought Paper Hero would give a cold snort and say something even harsher? “Useless officeholders? That's hardly the right term. I can tell you with complete certainty that even calling them predators feeding on the common people would be putting it mildly.”

Whenever he heard remarks like these from the pair, Instructor Luca would play dumb, or simply make his escape on the pretext of needing a piss, as if he suffered from intermittent deafness and a chronic prostate condition. What else could he do? One was a son of the emperor who said and did whatever he pleased. The other wanted revenge for his disfigurement and had probably lost his mind by now. Your old uncle here still wants to stay alive in this job until retirement, then go home and enjoy an official's pension. I've spent my whole life on a knife's edge. I can't let you two drag me into your reckless games and get me killed.

Sure enough, by mid-March, when Tea Immortal and Paper Hero were preparing to leave Europe for Chicago, Luca excused himself on the grounds that the situation in Europe was unstable. He had to return to headquarters to await orders and could not go with them.

Tea Immortal being who he was, he had long since seen through Luca's thinking. He neither mentioned it nor pressed him to stay, and took his leave after showing the older man every courtesy.

In any case, Malone's activities in Venice had largely been uncovered. All that remained was the political business of passing the blame around. The people at European headquarters could explain things to the nobles.

In the end, the name “Gu Wen” surfaced. Tea Immortal had seen the name before but had paid it little attention. In fact, even aboard the private plane to Chicago, he still thought little of this danger level one character. He knew Blood Owl had changed his pattern of behavior to hunt down and kill Gu Wen, but judging by the various recent reports of fighting among Chicago's Mafia factions, this fellow Gu Wen was merely a second-rate operator, hardly someone he would call particularly clever.

And so, at this point, Tea Immortal believed this hunting trip would let him kill two birds with one stone. As for Paper Hero, who was traveling with him, he had only ever had one objective…